I’m a Gun Owner, and Our ‘Gun Culture’ Is Killing Us

Guns, guns, guns.

As a longtime firearms owner, I remember the moment I realized gun ownership based on hunting and target shooting was morphing into something stranger and more disturbing—something that today goes by the name “gun culture.”

It was in the 1980s, when I returned to San Diego after years as a war correspondent in Central America, and went into a local gun store. There I saw that Israel and China had discovered the U.S. civilian gun market and were flooding it with Uzis and AK-47s, military weapons of war modified to fire semi-automatic. American gun manufacturers also picked up on this trend away from hunting and sports shooting to Reagan era “urban self-defense” amid paranoia about minority “crack heads” and Satanists. Colt’s Vietnam-era M-16s were soon “civilianized” to become Armalite AR-15s that gradually became America’s gun of choice.

Three percent of the U.S. population now controls 50 percent of our privately owned guns. That’s about ten million people, with 150 million firearms. Some gun owners revel in open carry laws that allow them to walk around streets, stores, and restaurants with handguns and long arms. Or, I should say, some white gun-owners, since police in many states with these laws tend to be more dangerously reactive to African American, Latino, or Native American people who openly display firearms.

Three percent of the U.S. population now controls 50 percent of our privately owned guns. That’s about ten million people, with 150 million firearms.

Assault rifles like those used by the Las Vegas shooter come with easy-to-load multi-round clips, flash suppressors, folding stocks, and legal workarounds that allow them to be fit with silencers or function like automatic weapons. Today much of the Mexican drug cartels’ armories of assault rifles come from weapons purchased at unregulated U.S. gun shows.

It might be a good time to discuss reinstating the assault weapons ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004, and limiting ammo clip capacity to ten rounds.

There’s also the issue of easy access to handguns, which account for most gun homicides. This was the case when a stalker murdered my niece at her Connecticut college eight years ago, shooting her seven times in the coffee shop where she worked part-time. The killer, in his journal, mused about raping and murdering her and killing all the other Jews on campus. Although found insane at his trial, he’d had no problem legally acquiring a handgun in Colorado.

I don’t know whether a background check would have kept this killer from obtaining a gun. But what sane person, gun owner or not, does not support universal background checks for people buying firearms? In California, where I live, background checks must be completed for all gun purchases and will soon be required to purchase ammunition, including for those who buy ammunition online.

Supporters of the “gun show exemption,” which lets people sell high-powered weapons in venues that attract thousands of people and with no FBI background check required, is not, as some claim, the same person-to-person transaction as me gifting a revolver to my nephew. Actually it’s more like gifting tons of armaments to drug cartels, terrorists, and convicted felons.

None of our rights come without limits and responsibilities. That’s why I’m required to pass an exam to show I’m competent to drive my car. It’s why I can’t legally purchase an RPG rocket (though it would be fun to fire one off at the shooting range). My First Amendment rights do not allow me to incite violence, threaten to harm elected officials, or point guns at people I don’t like.

When I first got licensed as a private investigator, I had to take a firearms safety course before I was allowed to possess a firearm for work. But most people can walk into a gun store and purchase a potentially deadly firearm with no training at all.

Once we acknowledge gun ownership is both a right and a public health menace, we might be able to begin a discussion.

As a PI, I once worked on behalf of a defendant, a 19-year-old African American youth who’d shot another 19-year-old over a $5 dollar pool bet. The shooting, I discovered, went back to a high school feud from the previous year, similar to one that led to a fistfight when I was in high school. The difference was that these kids had easier access to guns in a “gun culture” that told them carrying a firearm gave them greater status and security. As a result, one young man was dead and another young man’s life was ruined.

Once we acknowledge that individual gun ownership is both a right and a growing public health menace linked to more than 30,000 American deaths a year, we just might be able to begin a common-sense discussion about our responsibilities as citizens, free of the confusion between our weapons and our culture. Otherwise, we’ll continue killing each other to the uncomprehending pity of the world.

And that’s not a culture, that’s a pathology.

David Helvarg is an author, environmental advocate and private investigator. His latest e-book on Kindle is Blue Frontier – Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness.